One of the things that I learned from my father’s career as an airline pilot has nothing to do with the flying or discipline or the commerce of the actual job. What I learned is that the best way to make the acquaintance of a new city is to
walk it. My Dad has had the extraordinary good fortune to have seen the world and many of its great capitals. And in each one he has spent great amounts of time walking their streets. London, Paris, Rome, Tel Aviv, New York, and the list goes on. While still a young teen, he took me to Boston and walked me all over the city: along the Freedom Trail from Paul Revere’s house, through the open markets of Haymarket, from the Commons and Back Bay to the Fens. Because of that early experience, I fell in love with that city, and got into the proper habit of being comfortable using my feet as my primary transportation, where I can hear
the noises of the place I’m in, smell the food, hear the voices of the people around me.
As a young Mormon missionary, I continued to appreciate these kinds of experiences. While it is typical to see missionaries on bicycles or in cars in varying parts of the world, in Venezuela we were on foot, taking public transportation when necessary. My father’s experiences in Peru in the 1960s were the sam
e, and it looks like my grandfather’s in Holland were similar, though he and his companions certainly used the fietsen (bikes) like the natives.
Amsterdam and the other cities of The Netherlands offer as beautiful a walking experience as any other country in the world. At times I would consciously consider what the streets I followed might have been like over seventy years ago. What did Holland’s Elder Carr, as missionaries are titled, see, smell, hear, and take note of? Did he feel the same sort of comfort that I did while I was there? Yeah, I really felt good there, some sort of peace that defies logic a little bit, maybe, connected me to the place like few other places I’ve been.
In the 1930s, the missionaries used a journal with formatted pages provided by the mission to track their work: how many contacts? How many lessons taught? How much territory covered? By the 1980s, we used a yellow cardstock sheet and reported in by phone at the end of every week. We put a premium on being productive and kept these stats meticulously. So did Boice. But Boice, to his credit, also filled this journal with personal notes, pictures, concert ticket stubs, train passes, and a whole host of other things that added so much more context to an otherwise cut and dried numerical
accounting of his two-plus years in The Netherlands.
I loved his personal notes. At the end of every day, he would add a single sentence, or just a few words. I suppose a person of today’s generation would compare this to a “tweet” on Twitter, or one’s Facebook status. Boice used them to boil down his thoughts on the day’s accomplishments or challenges. They are at times humorous, pensive, intensely personal, or circumspect, and always very honest. If he had a bad day, he would say so. If he felt unproductive, he noted it. And the opposite, of course. In those comments one gets a glimpse of the
totality of experience, of how a single life is part of something so grand and so encompassing as the passing of history. In one simple comment in 1936, Boice commented, “There is going to be war.” On later pages he kept track of the number of English lessons he taught in Germany in 1938. No names, no addresses, only a simple number in a tiny box in the rows for each day, in a column marked “Eng. Lessons.” There are unknown and unrecoverable stories behind each of those numbers, families and individuals facing challenges that make my present day life seem worry-free and idyllic.
Through these little notes, I know my grandfather struggled with some of the same personal dedication and productivity issues that I experienced in Venezuela fifty years later. One of my problems in the mission was separating my fascination with the country, the culture, and the people from my work as a representative of the church and the gospel. He made mention of Dutch girls once, which I could really appreciate now that I’ve met a few and seen them on their bikes. It seems he liked dancing, or at least dances, as he noted many of them in his notes. He swam to stay in shape, and he noted whenever they would bicycle for fun. (I wonder if the Dutch see biking as fun, or is it simply their primary source of conveyance, sans romanticism?)
My grandfather kept track of his performing and the concerts that he attended. There is one note that made me burst out in tears the first time I saw it. He said, “Made the violin sing today.” This type of comment goes right down to a musician’s soul. That is, after all, the great achievement that every instrumentalist strives for: to command your chosen instrument so that it expresses itself as naturally as you would express yourself with your own voice. And he got there, and experienced a moment special enough that he wanted to record it for posterity. Then, over sixty years later, someone read it and got it. It was just wonderful.
So walking about Holland became something like that for me every day of the trip. I was slowly but surely “getting” Holland. If the people of Holland in the 1930s were anything like the people of Holland today, this was probably not difficult for my grandfather. He seemed to be a legitimately social person, likable and willing to like others. We enjoyed both Delft and Haarlem. The charms these places still possess are not lost on those who have made them slightly touristy today. But how much more fascinating they must have seemed in 1936 to a young boy from California, even one from such sophisticated places as San Francisco and Berkeley.
There is a great advantage to being able to walk up close to something like a church begun in the 13th century, a canal so filled with Lilly pads you imagine being able to step off of the banks and walk across the water. The walking experience is so superior to whizzing past in a car, as it allows you to slowly see one neighborhood fade into the next, and it gives your eye time to capture what the place is now, and gives your mind time to imagine what it may have been. Thus it was with the Beesten Maarkt in Delft, a small plaza used for centuries as a market for selling animals. It is filled with outdoor cafes now, and in both iterations it was a central gathering point for business in Delft. Surely my grandfather passed by the Beesten Maarkt as he criss-crossed the town doing the Lord’s work.
I came across a violin shop there, with a window display of raw materials and parts of violins in progress. I know that Boice bought a violin in Utrecht. The receipt is in his journal. I imagine at some point he stood in front of a shop window just like that one, analyzing the craftsmanship, reading the descriptions of where the best wood comes from and how it is used in the instrument. I wonder if the price – in Guilders – was a lot back then.
Recently, my sister put a note under my earlier post about Holland during World War II, noting what a remarkable story our grandfather is if, more than seventy years on,
we are still fascinated by and pursuing even the minutiae of his life. I couldn’t agree more. Yet, as much as we consider him special and unique and cherished, every family, every member of every family, may leave such fascination in his or her wake. My grandmother did graduate work at Cal Berkeley in the 1940s, no easy accomplishment for a woman and single mom in those days. She remarried to a man who played baseball against guys like DiMaggio and Musial during the war. My grandmother on my mother’s side was from Madrid, and fled to South America during the Spanish Civil War. My Peruvian grandfather – my step-grandfather – was a prototype Indiana Jones, guiding archeologists through the Andes Mountains on horseback with a rifle strapped to his saddle.
Are we of my generation going to be as fascinating to our descendants? Sometimes my Contemporary American Life seems dull and pedestrian in comparison to those of my ancestors. I drive to work with hundreds of thousands of others, one to a car, clogging the highways and burning gas. I work in an air-conditioned building with a cafeteria just across the atrium. I go to meetings, I have lunch a lot. I lament the past usefulness of my so-called music career, and sometimes I downright paralyze myself over trivial decisions, such as whether or not I should look at ratemyprofessors.com. I wonder if my descendants will see me as the ultimate navel-gazer, self-absorbed, self-obsessed, oblivious to my real human potential, analyzing every new wrinkle on my own face, standing with my back to the world while it twists and spins out of control.
It doesn’t have to be that way, you know. Sometimes we get discouraged: the world is a big place. What can one person do? But there is a simplistic answer to that question:
Do SOMETHING.
The world is indeed a big place, and that means there is virtually limitless opportunity to have an effect. Most of us will never have our hands on the kinds of levers of power that would allow us to change the world in one fell swoop, but can anybody wield that power? Should anybody? Still, each one of us is capable of doing SOMETHING, and we see the needs all around us.
Of course, as we delve deeper into the ramifications of accepting that we are capable of doing something, then we have to choose what. First, accept that our individual contributions are valuable, even if they may not appear to alter the course of history. My grandfather did not set off for Holland with the intention of changing the world wholesale, and in the grand scheme of things, he really didn’t. But for himself, his future family, for all those with whom he came in contact, sharing the gospel or teaching English, he did alter paths. He changed THEIR world, and his.
So if I’ve learned anything from this trip, it would be that it is high time to get out of myself and stop replaying my alleged tales of woe, that there are things to do, actions to be taken. In Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” he states,
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
This is the yoke that I would like to throw off of my shoulders. I would like to move more readily from thought to action. And though I have no idea whether my contributions are to be large or small, useful or ignored, or venerated by the many, that is not the point. The purpose of action is to serve others without regard to any self-aggrandizement caused by what we choose to do to affect the world around us. We must simply put one more oar in the water and pull toward that better place.
More from Kipling:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
